Documentary Review: 'The Beatles And India'

The Beatles Maharishi

By Mike O’Cull

The Beatles and India is an absolutely fascinating and in-depth documentary film and companion album that tells the story of the mid-60s period when the Fab Four embraced Indian music and culture, effectively bringing them to the public at large. The award-winning feature-length film is set to drop February 15th, 2022 via BritBox, the streaming service of BBC Studios and ITV, in North America. Produced by Silva Screen Productions and Renoir Pictures, it’s a must-see for Beatle fans and all lovers of world music.

This aspect of The Beatles’ lives and career between 1966 and 1968 has never been explained and explored to this degree before but it was an incredibly important time, the ripples of which are still being felt to this day. A 19-song companion album, The Beatles And India: Songs Inspired by The Film, is coming out on Silva Screen Records in tandem with the movie that features inspired retellings of Beatle songs by Indian musicians including sitar virtuoso Anoushka Shankar, Vishal Dadlani, Kissnuka, Benny Dayal, Dhruv Ghanekar, Karsh Kale, and Soulmate. Songs like “Mother Nature’s Son,” “Dear Prudence,” “Sexy Sadie,” “Back in the USSR,” “I’m So Tired,” “Julia,” and others, many written in India, are given classic and contemporary Indian interpretations that offer a different twist on these familiar tunes.

The film chronicles the group’s journey through Indian music and culture, a trek that began during the filming of their own movie Help! in 1965. It started with the need to replace one sitar string on an instrument being used in the film. This quest brought the band into the sphere of Indian musicians and culture, which George Harrison immediately began a lifelong bond with. This led Harrison to study with master sitarist Ravi Shankar and Harrison’s use of a sitar on the song “Norwegian Wood,” the first mixing of Indian sounds into Western pop and rock.

The group visited India for the first time briefly in July of 1966 on the way home from gigs in the Philippines. They returned for a longer stay in February of 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India, which has become a major part of The Beatles’ lore and legend. To its credit, the film relates the tale with no sweetened coating, taking us from their honeymoon phase with the Maharishi through their eventual disillusionment with him and their abrupt departure from India.

Some of the most emotive sequences in the documentary contrast footage of the Four in Rishikesh with the Maharishi and his followers with images of those same locations deteriorated and abandoned today. One gets a sense of the death of a dream from them, the failure of these supremely successful young men to find something of meaning beyond the wealth and fame that encircled them. The film is also filled with first-person accounts from people who were there about the events at the ashram and their up-close interactions with some of the most famous people alive at the time.

The Beatles and India also carries a subtext that illustrates how this period of Beatle history helped bring Indian people and culture into the Western mainstream. John, Paul, George, and Ringo weren’t the only musicians hanging out with the Maharishi (Donovan and Mike Love of The Beach Boys were also there) or the only Westerners to popularize meditation but the sheer magnitude of their celebrity probably did more to introduce Indian thought, culture, and music to Europe and the USA than any other single entity ever could have.

The cultural exchange they began made Indian sounds part of the rock vocabulary used by countless artists since then and began the expansion and evolution that has since spread Indian ideas around the globe. Now, meditation, yoga, and mindfulness are everywhere in the West but most likely wouldn’t be if the most famous band ever hadn’t brought them to us at the height of their career. The Beatles and India is one of the most compelling Beatle documentaries ever made and fills in the blanks about one of the most crucial parts of the group’s history. Settle in and watch every second.

Watch ‘Beatles In India’ Trailer